Ever notice how books are mostly within the same size range? That's because the maximal span of an object on which the human eye can usefully focus at close range is somewhere between 9 and 13 inches. Which is about the span from page to page of most open hardcover non-reference books. And also the range within most "foot" measurements fall in traditional measuring systems. Metric has no such equivalent because the meter is too long and next thing down is too-small decimeters (does anyone even use those?).
Similarly, a pound is about the optimal weight for throwing a rock or hefting a tool with one arm - a tennis racket is just under one pound and a baseball bat is about two pounds for a reason. An inch is about the width of the thumb. A yard is about one pace at a medium walk. A pint is the volume of a pound of water.
The mile, I'll grant you, is not a terribly intuitive measurement. It started off as an early attempt at decimalization by the Roman military - 1000 paces at a march. Then it subsequently got all fucked up by later English attempts at reconstruction and standardization. Personally I'd be okay with a "metrimperial" mile of 1000 yards (which was the original idea anyway) because decimals are indeed better at larger scales.
That's why American football works so well; its rules mix dozenal Imperial measures with a decimal frame: 100 yard field. That means large-scale movements that demand more precision can be done in decimal while smaller-scale estimating benefits from the advantages of dozenal. I'd wager Canadian refs generally calculate in fourths and thirds for short-distance things, which just goes to show the superiority of Imperial.
To me, metric is much, much easier to work with since everything is in powers of 10. And it's a lot easier to keep track of what a milli-, centi-, deca- and kilometre is, compared to 1/32s, inches, yards and miles.
Metric is better for large-magnitude and small-magnitude measurements, also for converting between magnitudes (lop off or add 0's). Imperial, however, is better for medium-magnitude measurements and conversions that stay within one level of magnitude. Which is why I used meters and liters for physics homework, but I will always use miles on the highway and gallons in the kitchen.
This has nothing to do with culture. Mathematically, the funny multiples that Imperial measures work in makes it easy to divide without remainders. Likewise, using base-10 for number and measures makes it easy to scale up and down. The idea that the government should force us to choose one or the other for all uses is insane and illiberal.
Costs very little if you phase it in over a couple of years, natural maintenance and replacement takes care of most of it, then you get strict to force the last holdouts over (eg the weights and measures refuse to certify shop balances if they're calibrated in Imperial; weather reports stop giving Fahrenheit, car speedos are only in KPH). A couple of years later, you're living in a metric country.
In the United States of America, many of us would consider that kind of broad government intervention to be a very great cost indeed.
Re:It's not just that the poster is a moron
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
To accelerate 1kg by 1m/s you need a force of 1N. If you push with a force of 1N over a distance of 1m you've used 1joule. If you did this in 1s then your power is 1watt. If you prefer to have an electric motor doing this work for you, it can produce this 1watt by drawing, for example, 1A at 1V. For 1A to flow at a volate of 1V, this means your motor will have an internal resistance equal to 1ohm
Right. Which shows that for science and engineering, metric is the way to go. Jumping from that to saying we need to fuck up our road system and grocery stores is a bit of a leap, though.
Do you really think that our mind is naturally suited to 3s and 4s?
Absolutely. That's the highest many societies can count. 1, 2, 3, many. That's it. Which shows you what's wired into our heads and what comes from training.
Japanese people don't have this problem -- the go ju-ich, ju-ni, ju-san. Their problem is about 4s and 7s and 9s.
Right. So 4, 3+4, and 3*3.
Not to mention 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6; while 10 is divisible by only 2 and 5. Thus mental division is easier, since you have recourse to fractions less often.
Sorry to snip all of your trendy social-construction rant, but it really didn't amount to any more than hand-waving.
What is the rational given in the USA for not using metric?
Its benefits are over-rated.
Is it some badge of honour to continue to use an outdated, more complicated system of measurement?
10 is divisible by 2 and 5. 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. This makes mental division twice as easy with feet than with meters. To my mind that's a good reason to stick with Imperial for all but scientific purposes (where we've already been using metric for decades.)
Also, we've gotten screwed from previous times the government has tried to force it on us. 1.75 liters of whiskey is a nontrivial amount less than a handle of whiskey.
It's not just that the poster is a moron
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Napoleon, whose judgement was exceptionally keen on all non-Russian-winter related fronts, saw the problem right at the beginning, when he said of the "metric system":
"Nothing is more contrary to the organisation of the mind, of the memory, and of the imagination."
He was right. Our mind, unaided by an exterior calculating device, works best with 3's and 4's. Which is why the 3- and 4-based Imperial system is vastly more serviceable for everyday use.
It has a stronger foothold everywhere the GDP is lower. The more expensive M$ licenses are compared to the cost of a worker, the more enticing opensource is.
I don't believe this is true at all. For one thing, anti-piracy efforts tend not to go as far in lower-GDP countries. Also, Open Source products tend to be more knowledge-intensive to use (even just to know about) and more bandwidth intensive to get. If your country's technical education and network infrastructure have less equipment, it's not going less of an option.
Remember the Egyptian Linux guy from a few weeks back? He said that to most Egyptians "computer" means "Windows" and "email" means "Hotmail". I'm becoming increasingly doubtful about this "less-rich countries are natural friends of FOSS" line.
I'd put my biggest bets on middle-tier countries like Japan, Korea, and Germany; who have had widespread broadband adoption earlier than their neighbors and are historically strong at technical training.
...concerning MS in Europe? I'm just interested to see how deeply entrenched they are there financially. It may be just the stuff I'm reading, but open source seems to have a stronger foothold there than in the States.
As usual it's difficult to get statistics on client software, but web-servers are easy. securityspace.com keeps statistics on web server breakdown by top-level domain. Of course TLD isn't a great indicator of where a box is actually located, but to my knowledge it's the best we've got to go on.
Breakdown across all domains is around 70% Apache, 20% IIS, 10% other. (This is broken down by number of domains served, not number of servers running). It's about the same for.com, Apache does a bit better on.net, IIS does a lot better on.edu and.gov.
.fr (France) has a slightly higher than average score for IIS (~28%). In fact, based on my admittedly incomplete survey of the statistics, IIS seems to run about even with or ahead of Apache in most Western European TLDs. IIS seems to clean up in Latin America, the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia. Apache seems to have near-total dominance in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and practically the entire former Communist East Bloc.
Again, disclaimer: TLDs aren't a very good measure, and I haven't studied the results exhaustively. But based on what I've seen of it so far, I'd say that:
1. The idea that Europe and the Third World are the natural hotbed for Open Source looks less certain. Right now they're pretty happy with pirated MS products, and are likely to stay so for a while.
2. In general, the higher a country's historical commitment to technical education, the higher its uptake of Open Source. Which suggests to me that MS is indeed doing something very right with ease-of-use (surprise to OSS zealots, perhaps), while at the same time OSS is doing something very right with technical solidity (surprise to not really anyone).
What MS need to assure is that MicroSoft finally will become a company that provides what the customers want. Today MS is among that line of companies pushing the customer to buy and not asking the customer what the customer want (I've heard from insiders how this works).
The Joel on Software article yesterday pointed out that during MS's big growth leaps in the 80's and early 90's, the number of new PCs sold every year typically exceeded the entire installed base. Now that's no longer the case.
Because they rely primarily on OEM licenses for revenue, MS has to somehow artificially stimulate hardware upgrades in order to acheive acceptable growth without a major change in business model. (A change to what?, one wonders.)
The places where you're seeing movement to Open Source desktops are not coincidentally the places that tend to be most resistant to hardware upgrades. In the end, if MS withers, it'll probably be because users won't stomach Dell et al.'s reasonably low prices, rather than MS's own inflated ones.
...about the official Mozilla project's continued split focus between Firefox/Thunderbird and the full Seamonkey suite, which is now apparently going to continue even after the standalones reach 1.0.
Mozilla's crucial mistake early on was deciding it needed to be a platform. If this had just meant developing a cross-platform gui and tools, or just developing a whole application suite, it might not have been a problem. But they decided to do both. It cost them, and it continues to cost them.
IBM's Eclipse project is a good example of how to do a platform. Start small with one app: in Eclipse's case, an IDE. Then build the rest of the stuff around the skeleton: IBM's new Workplace package is basically built from Eclipse plugins.
But continuing to devote resources to Seamonkey is just a bad idea. Not only is it a distraction from making the small, focused apps better; but keeping around Mozilla as an Emacs-style do-everything suite does IMHO damage to the brand name. I for one have nothing but bad memories of Netscape, because of the ungodly bloat of Communicator. Any project that continues to officially perpetuate that mistake loses respect in my mind, and I would guess in many others' as well.
Regardless of that, I still fail to see how applying a law to everyone, regardless of their faith, creed or colour, can be considered racist.
Oh, come on. Why do you think the law was passed? Because of hordes of yarmulked Jews descending upon French schools and government offices? Because tons of French non-observant Catholics alla sudden decided to get up and start wearing scapulars all over the place?
No. It's a clear and unsubtle response to the increasing popularity of conservative Islam among French Muslims.
Oh, I'll also add that carrying a ceremonial knife on their person is inherently part of the Sikh faith that is required of Sikh men. Do Sikh men get a free pass when it comes to taking knives into US airports and on US airplanes? I don't think so.
Probably not. But Sikhs do get the federally-protected right to wear their kirpans to American schools, even if school regulations otherwise ban the carrying of knives. [Cheema v. Thompson (9th Cir. 1995) 36 F.3d 1102]
I will admit, though, that American protection of religious practice is not perfect. For example, religious use of peyote is not allowed to American Indians - which is part of the much larger problem of the drug war.
On the specifics of the French government's position, realise that they are doing nothing more than enforcing strict seperation between church and state. This, you might have noticed, is also the policy of the US
"Separation of church and state" is not in the constitution; it's an offhand phrase from a judicial decision interpreting the constitution. The actual clause in the Bill of Rights reads:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
The approaches of the US and France to religion are similar in intent but different in implementation. Our constitution bans enforced religious practice. Your laws mandate enforced laicism in some cases. I think it's obvious we're not gonna agree on which is better just at the moment, so perhaps we should just leave it here.
If it's of any relevance to you, I'm not a Muslim. Does that somehow prohibit me from making statements about Islam and quoting from the Koran to prove my point?
No. It just clarifies the scope of how much your point matters. If we were having an academic debate on the finer points of the shari'a, you might be worthwhile to listen to. But the question is whether or not the French government's recent legislation placed an undue burden on a specific group (religious Muslim women).
You say that Islam doesn't require the headscarf anyways. Here, you're not merely advancing an abstract opinion, but you are moreover sanctioning the use of governmental coercion to enforce that opinion. That might even be understandable (but unacceptable) if you were a believing Muslim who had a real stake in the correct interpretation of the Quran; but since you are not, it's both unacceptable and insincere.
I call bullshit.
And by the way, exploiting the rhetoric of native reformists and secularizers to justify repressive measures is a time-honored tactic of ugly colonialist powers, including the US vs. Native Americans and the British vs. India. The leap from "We are backward, let's move forward" to "They are backward, let's force them forward" is not a legitimate one.
Are you a Muslim, sir? If your answer is "no", that may not invalidate the arguments you've quoted, but it does make your viewpoint on the question (not to mention that of M. Chirac) wholly irrelevant.
I've heard this argument before. Since I'm not a Muslim I wouldn't want to judge the issue either way, and I certainly wouldn't want to decide policy based on it.
The colonial administration in Morocco, on the other hand, used to require every qadi (religious judge) to be approved by a Paris-trained Orientalist.
France banned all overt religious clothing and items from state schools, and this ban applies to all religions, so a Christian cross is treated no different from a Muslim headscarf or a Jewish skullcap. This is a far cry from you claim that all Muslim citizens are banned from wearing headscarves.
Christianity does not require wearing a cross, either by statute or tradition. France's Jewish population underwent significant shrinkage in a little event that we'll just skip over right now, not many of them are Orthodox anyways, and the Orthodox ones typically go to their own schools.
So in reality the law is not even-handed at all. 90% or more of its impact is on Muslims wearing headscarves. And by the way, it applies to gov't offices as well, so it affects people's livelihoods as well as education.
yet you want to run down Europe as a racist's paradise?
No. Just to point out that Europhile accusations about US racism (which come from clueless Americans more often than not) gloss over a lot of skeletons hanging in Europe's closet.
There are two sides to every story...Utopia doesn't exist either side of the Atlantic
Nah, we learned everything we need to know about freedom from the USA. Really. We'd still be in mud huts if it wasn't for the American people bringing us freedom and civilization.
No. Our revolution started off as a defense of the Rights of Englishmen and all that. You guys have us beat by a while.
I love how anti-Americans always bring up US racism. I talked to a bunch of Indian expats in France, and they had plenty of complaints about similar or worse problems over there compared to the US. France also recently banned its Muslim citizens from wearing headscarves and making a living at the same time, not to mention Germany's insanely restrictive citizenship policy.
France and Germany are well respected free press countries. There is even this report of 2002 where Germany received a better rate for free press than USA.
The US has proven itself a long-term if not always perfect friend of Free Speech. European enthusiasm for the concept is very new, its roots not deep, its future far from certain. Depending upon the care given to its tender shoots, this new growth may spring up higher than its parent (remember that) or may wilt tomorrow.
But love of liberty has been ingrained and enshrined in the American character and laws for over 200 years. No one else except perhaps Britain can match that.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever notice how books are mostly within the same size range? That's because the maximal span of an object on which the human eye can usefully focus at close range is somewhere between 9 and 13 inches. Which is about the span from page to page of most open hardcover non-reference books. And also the range within most "foot" measurements fall in traditional measuring systems. Metric has no such equivalent because the meter is too long and next thing down is too-small decimeters (does anyone even use those?).
Similarly, a pound is about the optimal weight for throwing a rock or hefting a tool with one arm - a tennis racket is just under one pound and a baseball bat is about two pounds for a reason. An inch is about the width of the thumb. A yard is about one pace at a medium walk. A pint is the volume of a pound of water.
The mile, I'll grant you, is not a terribly intuitive measurement. It started off as an early attempt at decimalization by the Roman military - 1000 paces at a march. Then it subsequently got all fucked up by later English attempts at reconstruction and standardization. Personally I'd be okay with a "metrimperial" mile of 1000 yards (which was the original idea anyway) because decimals are indeed better at larger scales.
That's why American football works so well; its rules mix dozenal Imperial measures with a decimal frame: 100 yard field. That means large-scale movements that demand more precision can be done in decimal while smaller-scale estimating benefits from the advantages of dozenal. I'd wager Canadian refs generally calculate in fourths and thirds for short-distance things, which just goes to show the superiority of Imperial.
To me, metric is much, much easier to work with since everything is in powers of 10. And it's a lot easier to keep track of what a milli-, centi-, deca- and kilometre is, compared to 1/32s, inches, yards and miles.
Metric is better for large-magnitude and small-magnitude measurements, also for converting between magnitudes (lop off or add 0's). Imperial, however, is better for medium-magnitude measurements and conversions that stay within one level of magnitude. Which is why I used meters and liters for physics homework, but I will always use miles on the highway and gallons in the kitchen.
This has nothing to do with culture. Mathematically, the funny multiples that Imperial measures work in makes it easy to divide without remainders. Likewise, using base-10 for number and measures makes it easy to scale up and down. The idea that the government should force us to choose one or the other for all uses is insane and illiberal.
Costs very little if you phase it in over a couple of years, natural maintenance and replacement takes care of most of it, then you get strict to force the last holdouts over (eg the weights and measures refuse to certify shop balances if they're calibrated in Imperial; weather reports stop giving Fahrenheit, car speedos are only in KPH). A couple of years later, you're living in a metric country.
In the United States of America, many of us would consider that kind of broad government intervention to be a very great cost indeed.
To accelerate 1kg by 1m/s you need a force of 1N. If you push with a force of 1N over a distance of 1m you've used 1joule. If you did this in 1s then your power is 1watt. If you prefer to have an electric motor doing this work for you, it can produce this 1watt by drawing, for example, 1A at 1V. For 1A to flow at a volate of 1V, this means your motor will have an internal resistance equal to 1ohm
Right. Which shows that for science and engineering, metric is the way to go. Jumping from that to saying we need to fuck up our road system and grocery stores is a bit of a leap, though.
Do you really think that our mind is naturally suited to 3s and 4s?
Absolutely. That's the highest many societies can count. 1, 2, 3, many. That's it. Which shows you what's wired into our heads and what comes from training.
Japanese people don't have this problem -- the go ju-ich, ju-ni, ju-san. Their problem is about 4s and 7s and 9s.
Right. So 4, 3+4, and 3*3.
Not to mention 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6; while 10 is divisible by only 2 and 5. Thus mental division is easier, since you have recourse to fractions less often.
Sorry to snip all of your trendy social-construction rant, but it really didn't amount to any more than hand-waving.
What is the rational given in the USA for not using metric?
Its benefits are over-rated. Is it some badge of honour to continue to use an outdated, more complicated system of measurement?
10 is divisible by 2 and 5. 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. This makes mental division twice as easy with feet than with meters. To my mind that's a good reason to stick with Imperial for all but scientific purposes (where we've already been using metric for decades.)
Also, we've gotten screwed from previous times the government has tried to force it on us. 1.75 liters of whiskey is a nontrivial amount less than a handle of whiskey.
Napoleon, whose judgement was exceptionally keen on all non-Russian-winter related fronts, saw the problem right at the beginning, when he said of the "metric system":
"Nothing is more contrary to the organisation of the mind, of the memory, and of the imagination."
He was right. Our mind, unaided by an exterior calculating device, works best with 3's and 4's. Which is why the 3- and 4-based Imperial system is vastly more serviceable for everyday use.
It has a stronger foothold everywhere the GDP is lower. The more expensive M$ licenses are compared to the cost of a worker, the more enticing opensource is.
I don't believe this is true at all. For one thing, anti-piracy efforts tend not to go as far in lower-GDP countries. Also, Open Source products tend to be more knowledge-intensive to use (even just to know about) and more bandwidth intensive to get. If your country's technical education and network infrastructure have less equipment, it's not going less of an option.
Remember the Egyptian Linux guy from a few weeks back? He said that to most Egyptians "computer" means "Windows" and "email" means "Hotmail". I'm becoming increasingly doubtful about this "less-rich countries are natural friends of FOSS" line.
I'd put my biggest bets on middle-tier countries like Japan, Korea, and Germany; who have had widespread broadband adoption earlier than their neighbors and are historically strong at technical training.
...concerning MS in Europe? I'm just interested to see how deeply entrenched they are there financially. It may be just the stuff I'm reading, but open source seems to have a stronger foothold there than in the States.
.com, Apache does a bit better on .net, IIS does a lot better on .edu and .gov.
.fr (France) has a slightly higher than average score for IIS (~28%). In fact, based on my admittedly incomplete survey of the statistics, IIS seems to run about even with or ahead of Apache in most Western European TLDs. IIS seems to clean up in Latin America, the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia. Apache seems to have near-total dominance in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and practically the entire former Communist East Bloc.
As usual it's difficult to get statistics on client software, but web-servers are easy. securityspace.com keeps statistics on web server breakdown by top-level domain. Of course TLD isn't a great indicator of where a box is actually located, but to my knowledge it's the best we've got to go on.
Breakdown across all domains is around 70% Apache, 20% IIS, 10% other. (This is broken down by number of domains served, not number of servers running). It's about the same for
Again, disclaimer: TLDs aren't a very good measure, and I haven't studied the results exhaustively. But based on what I've seen of it so far, I'd say that:
1. The idea that Europe and the Third World are the natural hotbed for Open Source looks less certain. Right now they're pretty happy with pirated MS products, and are likely to stay so for a while.
2. In general, the higher a country's historical commitment to technical education, the higher its uptake of Open Source. Which suggests to me that MS is indeed doing something very right with ease-of-use (surprise to OSS zealots, perhaps), while at the same time OSS is doing something very right with technical solidity (surprise to not really anyone).
What MS need to assure is that MicroSoft finally will become a company that provides what the customers want. Today MS is among that line of companies pushing the customer to buy and not asking the customer what the customer want (I've heard from insiders how this works).
The Joel on Software article yesterday pointed out that during MS's big growth leaps in the 80's and early 90's, the number of new PCs sold every year typically exceeded the entire installed base. Now that's no longer the case.
Because they rely primarily on OEM licenses for revenue, MS has to somehow artificially stimulate hardware upgrades in order to acheive acceptable growth without a major change in business model. (A change to what?, one wonders.)
The places where you're seeing movement to Open Source desktops are not coincidentally the places that tend to be most resistant to hardware upgrades. In the end, if MS withers, it'll probably be because users won't stomach Dell et al.'s reasonably low prices, rather than MS's own inflated ones.
...about the official Mozilla project's continued split focus between Firefox/Thunderbird and the full Seamonkey suite, which is now apparently going to continue even after the standalones reach 1.0.
Mozilla's crucial mistake early on was deciding it needed to be a platform. If this had just meant developing a cross-platform gui and tools, or just developing a whole application suite, it might not have been a problem. But they decided to do both. It cost them, and it continues to cost them.
IBM's Eclipse project is a good example of how to do a platform. Start small with one app: in Eclipse's case, an IDE. Then build the rest of the stuff around the skeleton: IBM's new Workplace package is basically built from Eclipse plugins.
But continuing to devote resources to Seamonkey is just a bad idea. Not only is it a distraction from making the small, focused apps better; but keeping around Mozilla as an Emacs-style do-everything suite does IMHO damage to the brand name. I for one have nothing but bad memories of Netscape, because of the ungodly bloat of Communicator. Any project that continues to officially perpetuate that mistake loses respect in my mind, and I would guess in many others' as well.
it is running Linux. Weird.
Regardless of that, I still fail to see how applying a law to everyone, regardless of their faith, creed or colour, can be considered racist.
Oh, come on. Why do you think the law was passed? Because of hordes of yarmulked Jews descending upon French schools and government offices? Because tons of French non-observant Catholics alla sudden decided to get up and start wearing scapulars all over the place?
No. It's a clear and unsubtle response to the increasing popularity of conservative Islam among French Muslims.
Oh, I'll also add that carrying a ceremonial knife on their person is inherently part of the Sikh faith that is required of Sikh men. Do Sikh men get a free pass when it comes to taking knives into US airports and on US airplanes? I don't think so.
Probably not. But Sikhs do get the federally-protected right to wear their kirpans to American schools, even if school regulations otherwise ban the carrying of knives. [Cheema v. Thompson (9th Cir. 1995) 36 F.3d 1102]
I will admit, though, that American protection of religious practice is not perfect. For example, religious use of peyote is not allowed to American Indians - which is part of the much larger problem of the drug war.
On the specifics of the French government's position, realise that they are doing nothing more than enforcing strict seperation between church and state. This, you might have noticed, is also the policy of the US
"Separation of church and state" is not in the constitution; it's an offhand phrase from a judicial decision interpreting the constitution. The actual clause in the Bill of Rights reads:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
The approaches of the US and France to religion are similar in intent but different in implementation. Our constitution bans enforced religious practice. Your laws mandate enforced laicism in some cases. I think it's obvious we're not gonna agree on which is better just at the moment, so perhaps we should just leave it here.
Best,
- T.
If it's of any relevance to you, I'm not a Muslim. Does that somehow prohibit me from making statements about Islam and quoting from the Koran to prove my point?
No. It just clarifies the scope of how much your point matters. If we were having an academic debate on the finer points of the shari'a, you might be worthwhile to listen to. But the question is whether or not the French government's recent legislation placed an undue burden on a specific group (religious Muslim women).
You say that Islam doesn't require the headscarf anyways. Here, you're not merely advancing an abstract opinion, but you are moreover sanctioning the use of governmental coercion to enforce that opinion. That might even be understandable (but unacceptable) if you were a believing Muslim who had a real stake in the correct interpretation of the Quran; but since you are not, it's both unacceptable and insincere.
I call bullshit.
And by the way, exploiting the rhetoric of native reformists and secularizers to justify repressive measures is a time-honored tactic of ugly colonialist powers, including the US vs. Native Americans and the British vs. India. The leap from "We are backward, let's move forward" to "They are backward, let's force them forward" is not a legitimate one.
You wacky brits with your dry sense of humor. ;)
Are you a Muslim, sir? If your answer is "no", that may not invalidate the arguments you've quoted, but it does make your viewpoint on the question (not to mention that of M. Chirac) wholly irrelevant.
Islam doesn't require wearing a headscarf either.
I've heard this argument before. Since I'm not a Muslim I wouldn't want to judge the issue either way, and I certainly wouldn't want to decide policy based on it.
The colonial administration in Morocco, on the other hand, used to require every qadi (religious judge) to be approved by a Paris-trained Orientalist.
France banned all overt religious clothing and items from state schools, and this ban applies to all religions, so a Christian cross is treated no different from a Muslim headscarf or a Jewish skullcap. This is a far cry from you claim that all Muslim citizens are banned from wearing headscarves.
Christianity does not require wearing a cross, either by statute or tradition. France's Jewish population underwent significant shrinkage in a little event that we'll just skip over right now, not many of them are Orthodox anyways, and the Orthodox ones typically go to their own schools.
So in reality the law is not even-handed at all. 90% or more of its impact is on Muslims wearing headscarves. And by the way, it applies to gov't offices as well, so it affects people's livelihoods as well as education.
yet you want to run down Europe as a racist's paradise?
No. Just to point out that Europhile accusations about US racism (which come from clueless Americans more often than not) gloss over a lot of skeletons hanging in Europe's closet.
There are two sides to every story...Utopia doesn't exist either side of the Atlantic
Thank you. I agree entirely.
but then, when has he _not_ been jerk?
Probably while I was doing more worthwhile things than following hack writers for a dying genre.
Dr. Hose:
Pan Tarhei Hose =
panta rhei hws =
"everything flows thusly"?
Sir, you are a crafty philologist.
When the Phoenix switched from Orbit to Qute, I first thought it was a horrible, horrible decision!
Orbit is a sweet, sweet theme.
Nah, we learned everything we need to know about freedom from the USA. Really. We'd still be in mud huts if it wasn't for the American people bringing us freedom and civilization.
No. Our revolution started off as a defense of the Rights of Englishmen and all that. You guys have us beat by a while.
which are far right, further right and KKK
I love how anti-Americans always bring up US racism. I talked to a bunch of Indian expats in France, and they had plenty of complaints about similar or worse problems over there compared to the US. France also recently banned its Muslim citizens from wearing headscarves and making a living at the same time, not to mention Germany's insanely restrictive citizenship policy.
France and Germany are well respected free press countries. There is even this report of 2002 where Germany received a better rate for free press than USA.
The US has proven itself a long-term if not always perfect friend of Free Speech. European enthusiasm for the concept is very new, its roots not deep, its future far from certain. Depending upon the care given to its tender shoots, this new growth may spring up higher than its parent (remember that) or may wilt tomorrow.
But love of liberty has been ingrained and enshrined in the American character and laws for over 200 years. No one else except perhaps Britain can match that.